Monday Night Football ratings good, but not as good as ABC’s

The game broadcast of Monday Night Football on ESPN didn’t have the ratings heft of Monday Night Football on ABC, but it did produce the largest viewing audience in ESPN’s history, and ESPN’s day-long celebration of the event on television and on the Internet drew sufficient viewers to win praise as a “clear winner” from network president George Bodenheimer.

The Vikings-Redskins game had an average audience of 9.177 million households, marking the first time ESPN has delivered an average audience of more than nine million. It ranks second in cable television history behind CNN’s NAFTA debate in 1993 between Vice President Al Gore and Ross Perot, which delivered an average audience of 11.1 million households.

“Monday Night Football is a clear winner for ESPN,” Bodenheimer said. “We’re thrilled that fans enjoyed our new day-long, multimedia approach to this storied franchise.”

But while Monday Night Football brought unprecedented success to ESPN, it drew only about two-thirds the number of eyeballs that Monday Night Football drew to ABC.

Bear with me while I crunch the numbers.

ESPN is seen in 92.285 million homes, which represents about 83 percent of U.S. television households. ABC, of course, is available in 100 percent of households.

ESPN announced that it had a 9.9 rating for the Vikings and Redskins. But when you multiply that by .83, for its share of total households, you come up with a national household rating of 8.2. That compares to a 13.0 rating for last year’s Monday Night Football opener on ABC.

ESPN also reported a total audience of 12.57 million viewers for the game. ABC had 19.598 million for last year’s opener.

ESPN’s audience, therefore, is down 36 percent from ABC’s audience a year ago.

As we said earlier, ESPN is available in 83 percent of households and theoretically should have just a drop of 17 percentage points from ABC’s audience. In reality, it lost 36 percentage points – about double what should have been expected.

The second game between the Chargers and Raiders had an 8.5 cable rating and an average audience of 7.8 million households, for an equivalent household Nielsen rating of 7.1.

However, keep this in mind: ESPN is laying off the annual $1.1 billion price of Monday Night Football over its 11 assorted media properties, including ESPN Radio, ESPN.com and ESPN Deportes. For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised if people are paying a buck each extra for burgers at ESPN Zone restaurants to help pay the freight.

So, in that regard, it is helpful to note that ESPN.com registered 36 million page views Monday night (up from 24.68 million for last year’s MNF opener), and that ESPN registered 24.6 total Nielsen ratings points for its universe (20.4 points in household terms) for pre-game shows from noon to 6 p.m. I don’t have a figure for what ESPN’s ratings are on a normal Monday, but I’ll try to get that later for comparison purposes.